Java™ Phrasebook

17. Packaging and Documenting Classes

A Java application will typically consist of many classes, sometimes hundreds, or even thousands of classes. Because Java requires each public class to be defined in a separate file, you end up with at least as many files as you have classes. This can easily become unmanageable when it comes to working with your classes, finding files, or installing and distributing your application. Fortunately, this was considered when Java was created, and Sun has defined a standard packaging mechanism for placing related classes into packages. Packages in Java are a way of organizing classes according to functionality. The packaging mechanism also organizes Java source files into a known directory structure based on ...